Residents whose homes were spared by the fire and are no longer threatened returned home Sunday.

"Firefighters have made significant progress and gotten help from the weather," El Paso County spokesman Dave Rose said. "We had a little rain - one-tenth of an inch - Saturday."

The fire burned 15,500 acres and destroyed 482 homes east of Interstate 25, said Micki Trost, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

A man and a woman were found dead Thursday in a garage of a suburban home, and a firefighter suffered minor injuries, El Paso County spokesman Dave Rose said.

Names of the deceased have not been yet been released.

El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa said all people who lived in the area of the fire and were reported missing "have been accounted for."

The fire, which came within about two miles of the U.S. Air Force Academy, apparently started on a street populated with homes, Rose said.

Local officials have ruled out lightning as a cause of the fire and are investigating whether it was accidentally or deliberately started, he said.

Authorities have received 120 phone calls and e-mails about the cause of the fire and turned 14 over to law enforcement for further investigation, Rose said.

Jack and Judy Roe thought their home was among those destroyed but found it standing amid other scorched houses in their neighborhood.

"We've been on such an emotional roller coaster over this, thinking we had lost everything and then to find out that it's still there. It was a big relief to us, but I mean, our hearts were breaking for our neighbors," Judy Roe told the Associated Press.

Describing the scene, she said she saw charred piles of what remained of homes, with bricks the only distinguishable feature.

After touring the affected areas Saturday, Maketa said the wide destruction of the blaze appeared "as if a nuclear bomb had gone off in."

In terms of destruction, the wildfire "has blown away" the destruction caused last year by a wildfire in nearby Waldo Canyon, which burned 347 homes and killed two people, said El Paso County Deputy Commissioner Monnie Gore.